This listing shows posts that went onto AustCrimeFiction.org in the last 14 days. Sorted into post type groups - Blogs (Updates), Books, Reviews.

 

 

It’s January 1983. During his university summer break, Ryan Bradley returns to the remote town of Nashville in New Zealand’s rugged King Country.

It’s a bittersweet he’s working long, punishing hours as a woolpresser, he needs to sell his late mother’s house, and he’s increasingly feeling like an outcast in his childhood town.

But mostly he’s haunted by memories of Sanna Sovernen, a Finnish backpacker and his secret lover, who worked with him in the shearing shed the summer before - then vanished without trace.

IT IS THE EARLY 1980’S.

Greg Bowker is a young senior constable forcibly transferred to a one-officer station in a remote and dying Mallee town.

Welcomed by a brutal combination of heat, dust, isolation and primitive amenities, the new officer expects to waste years of his career in ‘purgatory’.

He is greeted with warmth by the community but becomes increasingly worried by the behaviour of two delinquent teenagers, one of whose family history hides a secret he cannot resist investigating.

1943 - Winton, Southland, New Zealand. Marine Randolph Harrington, the charismatic and handsome saxophonist of a visiting United States Marines jazz band, is found murdered by the banks of the Oreti River.

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders of 1828 terrify Edinburgh, until Burke is hanged and Hare disappears. Over a decade later, in the early days of New Zealand colonial settlement, a whaler washes up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. He calls himself Ōkiwi Brown, sets up a pub with an evil reputation and takes in a woman abandoned on his beach. Nearby, children sing dark nursery rhymes of murder.

'I was like a man washed ashore on an island, half mad and only my warrant card and blood-soaked uniform to vouch for me. But I had to act as if I knew what the hell to do.'

In Autumn of 1912, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins arrives at his new post in the fading gold town of Colley, NSW. On his first day, he is ambushed by a hidden gunman, his junior officer is killed before his eyes and he escapes back to town to find the police station burning to the ground. Someone has it in for the mounted troopers.

In Australia’s bucolic wine country, a homicide detective is on the hunt for a killer with a ruthless agenda in a gripping novel of suspense by the author of Black River.

Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.

All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pākehā writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit húli jīng as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories.

Summer, Adelaide, 1917. The impeccably dressed Miss Kate Cocks might look more like a schoolmistress than a policewoman, but don't let that fool you. She's a household name, wrangling wayward husbands into repentance, seeing through deceptive clairvoyants, and rescuing young women (whether they like it or not) with the help of a five-foot cane and her sassy junior constable, Ethel Bromley.

Rebecca Eaton has the sort of job you don’t talk about at parties. She’s a lawyer for children, a defender of the defenceless, a voice for the voiceless. At times, she even needs to protect parents from themselves.

It’s grim work, but the law is there to protect people, right? That’s what she thinks until it fails her and a child, and she finds herself caught in the grey areas of New Zealand’s surrogacy laws. She must find a way to protect both herself and her clients, and face what motherhood means to her. Where is her breaking point?

A 15-year-old girl is hiding from her biological father in an exclusive boarding school for difficult girls in New Zealand. She and her mother changed their names and hair, but they live with their getaway bags packed.

GUARDIANS contains all the loved and colourful characters from the first book as Robert/Bob journeys on his dangerous path of truths and non-truths, justice (tika), and murderous revenge connected to his family's past. A gripping good yarn with fast actions, the spiritual world of spiritual and mortal guardians, and vibrant, spirited characters against a Kiwi-background.

It’s 1918, in a Wellington that few people would recognise today, and two major events are about to the signing of the Armistice to end World War I, and the soldier-borne plague we now call the Spanish flu. Into this comes Wellington's only female lawyer, leading her group of Sapphist friends as they attempt to strike a blow for women’s freedom. They go head-to-head with the authorities while she finds herself acting as Crown prosecutor in the case of a wealthy socialite’s “murder” of her husband by kissing him.

London 1838: The cast-out child of an aristocratic mother, Hannah 'Birdie' Bird is a laundry maid with a hidden past and a suspicion that the wealthy family she serves is hers.

Longing for beauty and liberation, Birdie risks everything to change her circumstances. She falls into love and crime, committing an audacious silk heist. When she is betrayed, she finds herself swept into a wave of female convicts, transported to the ends of her known world.

They wouldn't arrest a 98 year old for murder...would they?

Following on from the events of Diamonds and Drowning, Alice is determined more than ever to keep her friends safe, while getting justice for Teresa. As she plans her next steps she is side tracked when the Silvermoon Retirement Village manager is accused of theft, and then Alice finds a dead body in her apartment.

All the evidence points to her being the killer, and she realises she is up against the most cunning opponent she's ever faced.

James Ballard is a recently bereaved single father to a baby daughter, and a medical editor tasked with saving the ‘third oldest medical journal in the world’, the Royal London Journal of Medicine, from the mistakes no one else notices – the misplaced apostrophes, the Freudian misspelling, the wrong subtype of an influenza strain (H2N1 or H5N1?).

Maxine has been losing things lately. Her car in the shopping centre carpark. Important work files—and her job as a result. Her marbles? ‘Mild cognitive impairment’, according to the doctor. Time for a nursing home, according to her daughter, Rose.

Rose has her own troubles with a recurring vision of a locked cupboard, claustrophobic panic. Something in the shadows. Something to do with the old family house in Kutarere.

The Devil’s Island is living up to its name, serving up the ghosts of its dark past, while Ric is haunted by his own demons. The truth is unravelling, and death is closing in from all sides. And now, it's stalking Elaina.

Ric's past is catching up to him, with a vengeful man seeking retribution for a catastrophic blunder in Indonesia. Ric has kept a secret hidden from Elaina, fearing that she will not … cannot, forgive him. That after all they’ve been through, he’s not the man she believes him to be.

A scenic walk in nature isn’t Addison Harper’s idea of a good time, but with Sergeant Jake Murphy leading the way, he’s willing to give it a go.

After a picnic as delicious as his date, things are really looking up – that is, until Addison stumbles over something in the undergrowth. Bad news: it’s a dead body. Worse news: it’s his ex. And the last time they saw each other, a room full of people witnessed Addison wish him dead.

He should never have strayed from the path…

A champion of regenerative farming is brutally murdered. An intensive dairying advocate has shot himself. What is going on in this peaceful rural community?

Lauren Fraser, visiting South Canterbury, puts herself in danger as she begins to unravel the tangle of criminal activity.

Ro Wisbech, nearby, researching high country farming aristocracy, uncovers family secrets that spill over into the investigation. She also feels at risk.

‘When I last saw Ashleigh, she was lying in a pool of blood . . . Her eyes were open, staring sightlessly into the sky. I’d like to think she saw the stars before she died; that in her last moments she flew, soaring on serotonin, dreamy with dopamine. I’d like to think she didn’t suffer . . .’

A beautiful young law student dies on the concrete below her third-storey window in chilly Dunedin.

It’s clear enough how she died. What isn’t is why — or who’s involved.

A skeleton is unearthed in a suburban Auckland backyard. A woman disappears. A teenager is abandoned.

These events change the trajectory of Tova Tan's life, which she is slowly rebuilding after her involvement in a traumatic kidnapping. Reluctantly, she agrees to look after the teenager, Lonnie, while police track down the girl's mother.

All she had to do now was disappear.

The Hermitage Mt Cook, New Zealand, 1946 When the volatile Stella is hired as a mountain guide she vows never to return to a life of domesticity below the snowline. With her mentor Philip and troubled returned soldier Jim she roams the Southern Alps finding freedom in her unconventional career. But Stella and her friends are powerless to prevent a tragedy which will shatter their lives.

Lawyers, drugs, deaths, and sneakiness, in New Zealand.

A Fly Under the Radar is a ripping yarn. It’s cantankerous and unexpected, with an eccentric cast that includes a millennial side-kick, a conniving landlord, a dangerous accountant, and starring a misanthropic grump who unwillingly becomes a criminal mastermind. This book is bitingly funny, and astonishingly clever, like if Jack Reacher had a sense of irony.

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on things that aren't hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.
 

The lake’s tranquillity shattered by the murder of a swimmer

A boy’s false confession...

An amateur sleuth must prevent an injustice.

Back on the job after a disastrous undercover investigation, Detective Kyle Williams is hanging on by a thread. While recovering from being shot and losing the love of his life, he’s drawn into the dark, cold-case murder of two young lovers who got mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Dare to Enter a World of Secrets and Consequences in No Repeats.

Rebecca Cashmore is a brilliant lawyer and prominent TV host who harbours a secret life that sets her apart. Within her waterfront home is a hidden sanctuary that aligns with her unique lifestyle, a refuge from a world quick to judge.

A phantom in the shadows, moving beneath the shroud of London’s night, David prowls the desolate park. Unaware of danger, his victims fall into his trap with cold precision, solidifying his grim reputation as the ‘London Strangler’.

It's 1962, and all is not as it should be in this sleepy rural town. An elderly war widow wakes up to discover the naked body of a young man in the uppermost boughs of her Macrocarpa tree.

It's up to Senior Constable Elspeth Belfry and her lieutenant, Caddie, to solve the puzzle.

On her first day back from maternity leave, Detective Sam Shephard is thrown straight into a cold-case investigation – the unsolved murder of a highly respected Anglican Priest in Dunedin.

The case has been a thorn in the side of the Police hierarchy, and for her boss it' s personal.

With all the witness testimony painting a picture of a dedicated church and family man, what possible motive could there have been for his murder?

In 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, Tom Blake learns his wife is lost in France. She was arrested by the Gestapo but where is she now? More shocking, when last seen, Madeleine was pregnant. Tom returns to a France that has been devastated by war to try and find both his wife and his child. Even with the help of good friends, Tom, traumatized by his own actions during the war, could fail.

Oak Tree Lodge is a classy inner-city boarding house with just four guest rooms. But there is nothing classy about Leo Murdoch, the proprietor, who lives upstairs and spies on his guests.

Covid-19 is sweeping the world, and the country is hours from lockdown. Meg Hart, a beautiful, backpacking tourist with nowhere to go, is desperate for a place to stay. There is one vacancy, the room previously occupied by the aspiring young actress, Chelsea Green, who disappeared two weeks earlier.

And now Meg is trapped.

Ella Hampton makes a mayday call from Aurora on the Hauraki Gulf saying her husband has been lost overboard during a jibe (gybe) manoeuvre. A body identified as Dean Hampton washes up with a gash to the head and other injuries. The coroner rules it an accident.

Criminal psychologist Nellie Prayle loves solving murders. The more complicated, the better. But when a professor of astronomy is found dead at Tekapo’s Mt John Observatory during its internationally-attended 50th anniversary conference celebrations and Detective Jack Simmons calls on Nellie to help with the police investigation, she soon realises that this is not your typical murder – and nor are these your usual suspects.

A bombshell in the newspaper causes Veronica Tracey to scramble for a plan to deal with potential fallout. Then out of the blue, she steps into a minefield created by her Nana and her on-again off-again boyfriend Ben Reynolds. The blast radius touches all aspects of her life permanently changing the trajectory.

‘No one will invest in a business focussed on family violence – it’s the opposite of sexy.’

Lauren Brown, owner of Weeping Angels, smiled. ‘Maybe to men.’

Business is booming for Weeping Angels – an agency that helps victims of family violence obtain protection orders. Lauren, who ambitiously wants to fix the justice system, contacts journalist Grace (‘Ace’) Marks to increase pressure on the government. A woman who obsessively guards her privacy and her past, Lauren knows she will need to step out of the shadows where she has lived her entire life.

A dazzling new series from bestselling historical fiction author Deborah Challinor, exploring the fascinating world of Victorian funeral customs and featuring Sydney's first female undertaker. Tatiana Caldwell's childhood in London is idyllic and filled with the love of doting parents. But when they die in quick succession, she's left heartbroken and destitute, and at seventeen emigrates to Sydney in 1864, determined to build a new, financially secure life for herself.

'Cockroach' Karl Copley, a crackhead crim with a small brain and a big mouth, convinces his former best friend Richie McMullan - now a squeaky-clean senior cop - he can help rescue Barbara 'Barbie' Konstantinou, a high school crush apparently held for ransom by bikers in New Zealand's sunny north.

Problems pile up quickly, though, when Barbie doesn't want to go back to her effed-up family and it emerges there's much more at stake than a simple kidnapping.

Florence. Autumn, 1539.

Cesare Aldo was once an officer for the city’s most feared criminal court. Following a period of exile, he is back – but demoted to night patrol, when only the drunk and the dangerous roam the streets.

Chasing a suspect in the rain, Aldo discovers a horrifying scene beneath Michelangelo’s statue of David. Lifeless eyes gaze from the face of a man whose body has been posed as if crucified. It’s clear the killer had religious motives.

Able, Dylan Alcott

I listened to Alcott read this memoir himself so that was a bit of a joy in and of itself, there's something about the infectious tone of his voice that's very engaging, and pretty funny in places. He's got a dry sense of humour that's for sure, but in ABLE he doesn't shy away from the complications of a life spent with some physical restrictions as the result of a tumour on the spine that he was born with. In 1990. Sheesh, the things this man has achieved in his lifetime make me wonder what the hell I've been doing for all my years.

Three Boys Gone, Mark Smith

When three 16 year old boys on a school hiking trip run into perilous surf, the only witness is Grace Disher, the teacher in charge of the trip, who reluctantly defers to the first rule of rescue: don't create another casualty and stands helplessly by as the boys disappear. 

The Campers, Maryrose Cuskelly

The first line of the blurb for THE CAMPERS describes it as "An engrossing and provocative exploration of privilege, hypocrisy and justice... " which is about as perfect a description as you'd ever want. This is discomforting, confusing, and confronting reading, a story that is classified as crime fiction for unusual reasons.

Return to Blood, Michael Bennett

Following on from the excellent first novel in this series, BETTER THE BLOOD, RETURN TO BLOOD is centred, once again, around Hana Westerman. Only now she has turned in her police badge, abandoning a career as a detective in the Auckland CIB, she's returned to her hometown of Tātā Bay to do some running repairs.

Home Truths, Charity Norman

HOME TRUTHS is the second novel I've been lucky enough to read by author Charity Norman that uses characters and connections to drive home an important, and devastating message. In REMEMBER ME she explored the complications of family, dementia and secrets. HOME TRUTHS is again an exploration of family and secrets, but it's also about grief, guilt and the viciousness of manipulation.